Social Media to Acquire New Customers

Every marketer will tell you that social media is essential for customer acquisition and brand awareness. However, no one can give you the exact roadmap to convert the random Twitter and Facebook users into your real-life customers. It is not even possible; different businesses have to address different challenges when it comes to acquiring new customers through social media channels. As Lisa D’Aromando, the social media community manager of Equinox says, “If you’re our customer, you’ve signed up for a year-long service, unlike the Starbucks of the world, where you can be a customer by coming in for a cup of coffee one day.” Thus, it is essential to tailor your social media strategy based on your specific industry. However, there are few universal ways to help organizations to attract new customers on the social channels.

Focus on your search

The first one is to create and share meaningful content. In fact, it is the best bet for any business for attracting and sustaining new followers to grow their business. Mashable spoke with some leading social brands few weeks back, asking the companies about their strategies for finding new customers as well as to connect with their existing customers. This social media news blog found that it is essential to keep a track of the social media behavior of your brands. Every day, more than 340 million tweets are sent and a few of them are likely to refer your brand without you noticing them. McKee Floyd, Sweetgreen’s director of brand development says, “Just because chatter on social media channels isn’t mentioning your brand by handle or hashtag doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

Thus, you need to be proactive. One of the best ways to keep a track of what people are saying about your brand on the popular social channels is to set up notification for searches and mentions for your brand or relevant keywords. You can use the personal social browsers like TweetDeck to pull tweets and Facebook mentions, even if the users are not using the hashtag.

The key here is to start monitoring all of your brand or related keyword mentions religiously. While monitoring the mentions about your brand helps to know what people are saying about your company, monitoring relevant keywords specific to your business will help you to understand the need of the people as well as the market trend. Based on such information you can create strategies to cultivate a new audience, attracting them with your new offers and products that address their needs and demands.

Another good way to find new customers is to peep into your competitors’ account. Look for the people engaging with your competitors and let them know about your business. Usually customers like to be handpicked; since you are asking them to check your products, they are more likely to take it as an honor. However, be charming and human in your approach rather than simply pushing your sales message.

Use engaging images

“A picture is worth a thousand words”

This concept is also applicable when it comes to acquiring new customers through social media. Take Facebook for example, photos posted on this social channel drive the engage the users twice as much as the post can do. Why do you think Facebook acquired Instagram? Yes, images attract people and promote user engagement. Thus, the tip is to start using images to attract new followers and fans.

When asked about the trick of using images to attract clients, Danni Snyder the owner of Dannijo says, “You can subliminally market without annoying your customers because each post is capable of accomplishing a number of things.” And it’s very rightly explained, as images can successfully inspire discussion and user engagement while helping you to gain valuable customer feedback. At the same times, images provide visual inspiration and insight about your brands to your social followers.

However, there is no hard and fast rule for the images to be only product-focused. In fact, too much of promotional images are likely to annoy your followers, rather use any images that will attract and interest the social crowd.

Hosting competitions

Nothing interests customers like the freebies and contests are one of the best ways to offer your giveaways. Better yet, contents are great to boost your user engagements. However, you need to be strategic about your offerings. While discussing one of their contests, Natasha Khan, the social media manager of ModCloth said, “The social actions surrounding that event brought in thousands of new fans, which we otherwise would not have gained.”

Contests and offers, if planned strategically, can create high impact on generating new customers. For conducting social media contests, make sure you are allowing the users to share the content of the content to their social networks. This will not only increase user engagement, but will also increase virality. Tailor the contest to fit the platform where you are running it. Finally, be in-sync with your brand for relevant customer generation.

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About Debajyoti Banerjee

Debajyoti Banerjee is Founder & CEO at Seven Boats Info-System- a leading strategic Internet Marketing company, Digital Marketing Trainer, Entrepreneur, Web Strategist & Internet Marketing Consultant in Kolkata area, India. Deba helps other businesses to transform their online presence, to attract new leads and to convert their prospects by his expert web consultancy. Get in touch with him on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter

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